Stephen Dobyns: Prague
The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?
Joan E. Bauer: Brown Skin | Probable Cause
My niece says they’ve raided the carwash.
Her former nanny, a longtime citizen,
afraid to leave home.
H.G. Reza: Living While Brown in America
Walking through a Home Depot parking lot while being brown raises enough reasonable suspicion in an immigration agent’s mind to cause my detention for a citizenship check…
Kurt Brown: The Kiss
That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me?
George Yancy: I Am on Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist.” I Know How It Destroys Civil Debate.
I deeply value free speech and debate. The watchlist created by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA is anathema to both.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Cries of Isaac and Ishmael
We can feel brokenhearted for the suffering of the children of Isaac and of Ishmael. We must.
Audio: Son House performing County Farm Blues
Put you under a man called “Captain Jack”
Put you under a man they call “Captain Jack”
He’ll sure write his name up and down your back
Jane Mead: Passing a Truck Full of Chickens/at Night on Highway Eighty
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
Jessica Corbett: Spain Joins Italy in Sending Ship to Protect Gaza-Bound Sumud Flotilla
The UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories implored other countries “to mobilize their fleet to grant the flotilla safe sailing to Gaza, and deploy a real humanitarian convoy to break the blockade.”
Frida Berrigan: Preparing for Scarcity
The truck wheel’s inner tube was right in front of me, no longer half-submerged in the pond’s late summer muck. After so many hot weeks without rain, the water had dried up and the garbage was completely exposed.
John Ashbery: A Worldly Country
For night, as usual, knew what it was doing,
providing sleep to offset the great ungluing
that tomorrow again would surely bring.
Abby Zimet: Optuse Sexual Predator Approved
In honor of his speech at the UN, wherein he raved, bloviated and browbeat world leaders, patriots have erected a new statue in D.C. of Trump and his “closest friend” Jeffrey Epstein
Ted Kooser: Abandoned Farmhouse
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
Michelle Zacarias: In Southern California, Small Groups of Activists Quietly Undermine ICE Operations
Organizers confront ICE wherever they can be found, from the hotels where agents sleep to the streets they patrol.
